The Corrs – Little Wing
We’ve been here before.
What is it about Jimi Hendrix‘s Little Wing that induces such foolhardiness and drives bands to turn their minds inside out attempting to replicate the song?
After Sting, apparently overfed on ego and too much fois gras, performed an audio force-feeding and distended the song into a horrifying nine-minute aural catastrophe, the only grease-sodden crumb of comfort was that surely no human being could host the latent evil to spawn a more awful version of Little Wing.
That knee-weakening wave of nausea, that primal prickle of the arm hairs, that icy ripple of pure terror strumming the length of your spine: it’s announcing the realisation that the unthinkable has already happened.
The Corrs manage to make music so flaccid that they would give Cliff Richard’s wizened phallus a run for its money. Sneering contemptuously at Sting’s attempt, they correctly identify that the song could sound even more comprehensibly limp and pallid, if only someone could remove any last vestiges of rock extravagance from it.
And so they tooled up to meet such a challenge head on by grabbing their chosen implements of torture – the school-hall agony of the tin whistle; the faux-folk violin, scourge of a million Irish theme pubs; and a singer Andrea Corr’s vomitously cloying voice, sounding the closest a human being has ever managed to accurately portray the comatose vocal nuances of a gaily-painted rocking chair.
In doing so, The Corrs have unwittingly answered one of rock’s most tantalisingly unanswered questions: why does Little Wing fade out at the precise moment that every listener is urging it to continue with every straining fibre of their being?
The answer is that Jimi Hendrix – a man who could play the guitar so well that it sounded like two people were playing, remember – was too short sighted to realise that what the song really needed at that point was a generic diddley-dee Irish fiddle solo, coupled with even more generic woah-oh-woah vocal-sturbation. It seems so obvious in hindsight.
But becoming privy to such greedily-envied knowledge comes at a price. In the case of the Corrs, they not only lost their souls, but also their minds. For Jim Corr now spends his time jabbering about conspiracy theories on radio phone-ins, possibly whilst sporting a tin-foil hat to stop the Lizard-beings from reading his mind. A cautionary tale indeed.
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